Curtis Judd

Learn lighting and sound for video--I post a new video every week covering lighting, sound, and camera gear for producing better video and film. Be sure to subscribe and get the latest updates to help you improve your video production value!

In this episode, a look at which resolutions, frame rates, and codecs the FREETAIL EVOKE CFast 2.0 (x3700) cards can support on the Blackmagic Design Pocket Cinema Camera 4K.
If you’d like to learn how to make great dialogue audio for your film and video projects, please have a look at my courses at https://school.learnlightandsound.com including processing dialogue audio, recording sound, how to use the Zoom F8 and F8n, and how to get the mo...

Get yourself entered for the microphone giveaway drawing: https://bit.ly/2zH84OY
Thanks to everyone for helping build this community where we focus on lighting and sound for video. Get yourself registered at the link above for the chance to win a Deity S-Mic 2 shotgun microphone. This is my favorite shotgun mic in the $350-ish price range and definitely a great mic for any filmmaker's kit.
And here's to 100K more!
If you’d like to learn how...

Single handle motorized gimbals for interchangeable lens hybrid and DSLR cameras have come a long way over the last few years. The original MOZA AIR was really good for the smaller ILM cameras and had a great app for remote control and time-lapse. The newest gimbal from MOZA, the AIR 2, is a nice step forward in a lot of ways. It can handle much heavier payloads, uses separate axis controls rather than “modes”, impressive battery life, a new s...

It has been a while since we’ve seen an innovative new handheld recorder with professional level pre-amplifiers and other features. The CEntrance MixerFace R4 and R4R, however, have done just that.
These are very compact mixer (R4) and recorder (R4R) that is very small, yet very rugged and sounds really great. They include an in-built Li Polymer batter that lasts up to 8 hours (nearly 7 hours phantom powering microphones in my tests) and prov...

Lots of people have asked me what type of microphone would work well for recording lectures, public speeches, demonstrations, or sermons, especially in cases where there might be a lot of ambient sound and noise.
Headset microphones are one good way to make these types of recordings and in this episode, we take a look at an affordable headset microphone option: The JK Mic-J 069 Cardioid Headset microphone.
If you’d like to learn how to make ...

Microphones in the $250 to $350 range are at a sweet spot between performance, sound quality, durability, and reasonable price. In this episode we take a closer look at the Sony ECM-674 shotgun microphone and compare it with the RODE NTG-2 and Deity S-Mic 2. All three of these microphones are shotgun style boom microphones with XLR balanced outputs. Let’s see how they compare.
If you’d like to learn how to make great dialogue audio for your f...

At NAB 2018, Deity Microphones made their debut and announced several new microphones for video and filmmakers. The D3 Pro is their new camera-top shotgun microphone but it has some features which make it stand out from many of the others on the market. First, it can automatically detect which type of 3.5mm input your recording device is using and adapts to work perfectly with that camera, phone, or audio recorder. And, with the D3 Pro Locatio...

After five years of producing a new video nearly every week, I need a short break just to catch up on a ton of things that have been neglected and recharge a bit. We've got a bunch of interesting reviews coming up after the break:
Sony ECM-674 Shotgun Microphone
Amazon: http://geni.us/t8ahw
B&H:
Centrance MixerFace R4 - 4 channel XLR/3.5mm TRS Mixer/USB Audio Interface. Great for mobile recording
JK Mic-J Headset Microphone
Amazon: http://...

Editing the dialogue sound for your film and video projects can seem a little daunting, especially when you have two or more actors, each with a wireless lavalier microphone plus a boom microphone. How do you edit all those tracks? Do you just keep the boom and lavalier mics? Won’t it sound richer if you do keep them all?
It turns out that it generally will sound quite a bit worse if you keep them all and the main reason for using both lavali...

How can you make higher contrast, more dramatic lighting for your video and photo projects? Hard light! In this episode, we demonstrate a few different dramatic lighting setups with the bitLighter 2, a very small, hard light designed for video and photography. It is super portable and renders colors well.
If you’d like to learn how to make great dialogue audio for your film and video projects, please have a look at my courses at https://schoo...